I said this is the Cold War thread but a vast majority of American jobs don’t actually produce anything.
It’s time people start recognizing that we need more real workers and less middle class white collar jobs. Sure wealth is great but products are better.
Lol, we produce plenty. We’re the second largest manufacturer in the world. It doesn’t matter what a job produces and whether or not it’s a tangible piece of shit, like a beach ball. What matters is someone has a high demand for an advanced product. Which is something we deliver overwhelmingly compared to every other economy on the planet.
If your argument is that there aren’t enough high paying jobs, yea I’d agree with you. Last thing we need to do is go back in time and stick every unemployed loser in a factory. That’d be a fucking disaster.
Let’s look at economies with “healthy” manufacturing bases... Poland has the most employed in manufacturing and China is the largest in output. You really want to import that standard of living here? We don’t need the same level of employment in manufacturing because our output is packaged with advanced machinery. It would be a misallocation of labor and redundancy otherwise. The crux of the problem is that we currently have too many trained workers for manufacturing, thanks to the design of our education system. The workforce needs to be completely retooled away from manufacturing as much as realistically possible and more into computer science and STEM. That way you can get back to things like single income households and build a large healthy middle class.
Luckily there are a lot of smart people in the right positions that understand how clownish of an idea it is to teleport back to 1955. What will most likely end up happening is the education system is going to be reformed into something more along the lines of a hybrid between for profit and non profit schools that focus on a combination of trade based services and computer tech. Keiser Universities is the model going forward with multiple campuses across multiple states almost like local franchises. State universities are going to have to radically change, and that will happen when the grant system begins really shifting to the private colleges and universities.
Manufacturing output will shrink in China and continue to grow here as manufacturing automates. The only thing that could change that is if the consumer purchasing power shifts to China, which could happen if we continue down this retard road of protectionism. You have to keep in mind it’s not so much about who makes the good as it is where the good is going. China, for all there manufacturing boogie man of cheap shit, is making these products for the west and can’t physically shift to local Chinese consumers. Yet. In the face of automation, the natural economic gravity pulls manufacturers to get closer to consumers. Hence why manufacturing will come back as long as we have wealthy consumers.
The biggest kicker will be 50 to 100 years from now when real solar comes online. The space based solar platforms are going to be a game changer. It could kick off WW3, or it could bring an entirely new era to humanity. It will have the same economic effects that oil had in the 20th century.
